A mobilisation comes from control as a message that rings the bells, lights the bay, and prints a slip with the address and the incident type, and every one is logged at control with the call that caused it. Ours prints a slip for a house fire, persons reported, at an address that has been a car park since 1994, and control's log has no call, no message, and no record of our bells ringing.
I am the watch manager, and the turnout slips are the record of every job we have been sent to.
How a mobilisation works.
A call comes to control, control sends a message to the station, and the message rings the bells, opens the bay doors, lights the route board and prints a slip: time, address, incident type, appliances. The crew read the slip on the way down the pole. Control logs the message and we log the turnout, and the two are reconciled, because the reconciliation is the record of the brigade's response.
There is no way to print a slip except a message from control.
Every few weeks, at about twenty to four in the morning, the bells ring, the doors open, and the printer prints.
House fire, persons reported, at a street and number. Two pumps.
The street exists. The number does not. It was a row of terraces that came down in 1994 and is a car park behind the shops, and every driver on the watch knows it, because you cannot not know it.
Control has no record. No call, no message, no log entry. Their system shows our station quiet at twenty to four, and their supervisor has watched our bells ring on our own camera at a time her screen says nothing was sent.
What has been checked.
The printer. Replaced. The station's mobilising unit, which receives the message and drives the bells and the printer, replaced and reprogrammed by the brigade's engineers.
The line to control. It is a dedicated connection and it is monitored, and the monitoring shows no traffic at the time.
The slip. It is printed on our paper by our printer in control's format with a message number that is in control's sequence and that control has never issued.
The address.
The terraces came down in 1994. In 1993 there was a fire in the end house, persons reported, two pumps, and this station attended, and it is in the brigade's history because a firefighter from this watch did not come out, and his name is on the board in the watch room.
The incident number on that job, in 1993, is the message number that prints on the slip.
What we do when it prints.
We go. That is not a decision. The bells ring, the slip says persons reported, and the crew are down the pole and on the appliance before anybody reads the address, and by the time the driver says where it is we are out of the doors.
We go to the car park. We put the lights on it. We walk it, with the thermal camera, and it is a car park, and we book in attendance with control, who log a mobilisation they did not send, at an address that does not exist, as a false alarm, good intent, which is the kindest category they have.
Then we come back and I write it up.
What is done about it.
It has been raised through every channel the brigade has, and the conclusion of the last review is that the station experiences spurious mobilisations of unknown origin, that the crew's response is appropriate, and that the mobilising equipment should be monitored, which it is.
What I do.
I manage the watch, and when the slip prints I go.
The one thing I have changed is that I read the slip in the bay, before the appliance moves, out loud, to the crew, the way it would have been read in 1993, when the slips were read out because there was no route board.
I started that after a night when the driver, who is new, took the appliance out of the doors on the bells without waiting for the slip, as you would, and at the end of the street he said, into the radio, that he had a route on the board to the address and that the board was showing the terraces, the row, the doors, the way they were, and he asked which end the fire was, and I said the end house, because I knew, and he said he could see it.